Regarding computer graphics, the rendering of convex shapes may be accomplished by representing the shape by a number of convex polygons. The rendering of convex polygons may be handled by any of a number of, for example, hardware implemented rasterizers. However, hardware rasterizers may not be capable of rendering concave polygons either properly, efficiently or at all. The rendering of concave polygons using such hardware is undefined and, mostly, produces incorrect results. A typical approach to rendering concave polygons involves tessellating the geometry of the concave object into convex polygons (e.g., triangles) and forwarding the obtained convex polygons to a hardware rasterizer.
However, the processes to tessellate the geometry is complex, computationally expensive, and can include processor and data intensive operations. For example, triangulation may result in an increase in the number of vertices used to represent an object shape. Thus, the computational effort to render the shape increases.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and apparatus to efficiently render concave polygons.